You're Not Famous
News
I am feeling very burnt out and exhausted this week, so putting together this newsletter was especially tough.
If you have an idea for an article for the next issue of Brief Candle, my Shakespeare ‘zine, send me an abstract or outline. 500-1,500 words, anything related to Shakespeare.
Flashback Friday
When I told Stephen Welch that I was planning to re-edit and migrate some of my old blog entries to Substack, he suggested that rather than publish them with antedated timestamps which would quietly push them back into the archives, that I do a “Flashback” series to actually make use of the old content. So, until I run out of vintage posts, I’ll be doing semi-regular trips down memory lane where I re-edit and republish entries from my old blog.
Here is another “Flashback Friday” post originally written in November of 2009 about social media. It’s interesting that I felt like in 2009 social media was a stable enough concept to write about and it’s also interesting that in 2009 I came to a tepidly positive conclusion, whereas in 2022 I have nothing good to say about social media.
As I said above, I am feeling really burnt out and exhausted and so I’ve done less re-editing on this old post than others in the Flashback series.
You’re Not Famous
The first time I ever heard of a "social networking" site, was through my friend Dave Samsel sometime in late 2002 or early 2003. We were at the 7-11 on Main and Harrison in Richmond and he was explaining Friendster to me. "You have a page, and other people have pages, and you can add people to be your internet 'friends' through the website.” At the time, the idea seemed really stupid. For the most part, the people I knew had so little to contribute and so little to say, the idea of them having a personal website seemed inane, and the idea of connecting those websites seemed frivolous and unwieldy.
For several years, I maintained my own personal website and it was a point of pride for me. Before the era of social networking, your internet presence was confined to the dungeons of newsgroups, message boards, and the occasional badly designed Geocities or Angelfire homepage. Maintaining a personal website was a way of making your mark in the vast new landscape of cyberspace. I dabbled in writing my own html before obtaining a pirated copy of Dreamweaver. Being able to search for yourself in Lycos or Yahoo and find your own website was like being a celebrity on a miniscule scale. I made my first website when I was 13 and printed business cards with my email address and website url. It was really, really cool.
I stopped maintaining my website when social networking took off. There seemed to be little point in keeping a personal website that was cumbersome to maintain and contained all the same information that was on my profile. In the interest of continuing the self-deprecating theme of my blog, and also for your amusement, here is a picture of the last incarnation of my personal website, "Pensive.”
This blog started as a component of that website. After I deleted my website, this blog sat unused for years. For a while, if you went way way back in the archives of this blog you could find the entries from when it used to be part of my website, with posts from Ty, Caitlin, and Nick.
I of course eventually gave into the tide of social networking. I signed up for Friendster in July of 2003 because Kerrigan told me that Friendster was the best way to meet girls. The idea that the internet could help me to meet girls blew my mind in 2003. I was interested in computers and the internet from a young age and it had always been the bane of my attempts to meet women and have them fall in love with me. Sorry, ladies, I'm busy this weekend playing Starcraft on Battlenet.
So I — like everyone else my age — followed the social networking tide as it went from Friendster to Myspace to Facebook and Twitter and Instagram. Snapchat became the line I drew in the sand. I decided when Snapchat started that I was officially too old to sign up for the newest social media app. I don’t even know what TikTok is.
I've been around for almost the entire span of social media (I was slightly too young and extremely too lame to be in on Makeoutclub) and the biggest problem with social networking is this:
Social networking makes dorks feel like rock stars.
I find celebrity worship nauseating, and even more unbearable when people who are not famous aspire to appear famous. I think that the power of the internet should be used as a way to break down pedestals, like when I trolled Travis Barker into PMing on Twitter to talk shit. That is what the internet should be for: making someone as famous as Travis Barker realize that he's a douchebag and fame won't change that, all thanks to a dork with no social clout.
When people think that they are famous, they imagine that the most everyday aspects of their lives are interesting to others. It’s so easy to produce and publish content, that people never stop to wonder if their content is worth publishing, or put another way, people are so preoccupied with whether they can, they don’t stop to think if they should. If people were to realize that they are in fact not famous, they would put forth more of an effort to either do interesting things, or at least only put the most interesting parts of their personality on display.
Another effect of dorks feeling like celebrities is that people feel that their privacy all of a sudden has become a matter of national security. Users of social networking sites use every security feature possible to hide their information from others and feel violated when they discover someone has viewed any of their information without permission. It’s ironic that someone would want to have a presence on the internet, the most widely-accessible medium for distributing information en masse but want to keep that presence a secret. It is noteworthy that celebrities in the classic sense don't keep their internet persona a secret. Shaq's Twitter isn't private, because he's a real celebrity.
In the days before social networking, you were only famous if you were talented, attractive, or interesting enough to give people who paid lots of money for cameras an excuse to point them at you. With limited television time and film reel length, no one in the media could afford to waste time and resources exposing just anyone to the limelight. In the era of social networking and micromedia, even the most mediocre college freshman can become an “influencer.”
I remember the era when people would write earnest descriptions of themselves on Friendster. Over time people began to be more minimalist and sardonic in their descriptions, writing only the tiniest snippet in an attempt to seem aloof and mysterious. There arose an etiquette for commenting and adding people on MySpace which people would use to snub each other. The whole ritual reeked of Mean Girls, big fish in a small fucking pond.
I hate to break it to you, but you're not a super cool rock star, you're a dork.
***
When I first wrote this blog post in 2009, I ended on a positive note by saying that the convenience of being able to keep up with far-flung friends outweighed the annoying faux-celebrity behavior prevalent on social media. But since I deleted all my social media accounts in 2020, I cannot end with that same endorsement.
Deleting all my social media profiles is one of the best things I’ve ever done for my mental health, time management, and reading. Trying to reduce my screen time or set arbitrary limits on how much time I spent on social media was a Sisyphean labor, trying to wrench my self-control and dopamine levels away from an entire industry of engineers whose entire job it is to keep me scrolling. I don’t believe there exists a “responsible” or “healthy” level of social media engagement and I don’t intend to ever return.
The only exception to my anti-social media stance is GoodReads, which only sorta counts as social media anyway. If you’re on GR, add me:
https://www.goodreads.com/veganmac